Programming Error Doomed Phobos-Grunt

In a report to be presented to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin on Tuesday, investigators concluded that the primary cause of the failure was “a programming error which led to a simultaneous reboot of two working channels of an onboard computer,” the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti reported.

In the U.S., we have had our fair share of issues with Mars and programming. Remember the 1999 loss of the Mars orbiter due to some systems using English measurements while others measured in the more standard metric ssytem?